Topic: So.. what the hell happened today? - page 3. (Read 4465 times)

I don't see how you say it is around 100 $. Are you adding the price of an ASIC or is it just the energy cost. I am talking about the cost of a new ASIC and the energy required to break even.

You are right about the difficulty going up which just proves my point. BTC mining is going to get even less profitable with the current parameters. Either the price has to go way up or ASIC and energy costs way down. Energy is not going to go down in cost. ASIC costs may but the pre-orders are already sold out so I don't see the prices going down soon. Therefore there is just one variable left and that is BTC price. If it goes up it will remain profitable; if not then any new ASIC purchase will be questionable at best.

Get out of this subreddit and start following the news channels.  There is a lot of positive progress going on and has been for some time. You're just caught up in the China noise.

Isn't this the second time in one month that you've "had it" with Bitcoin?


Bandits? What are you on about? They're just "speculators" like yourself.  Maybe they've got bigger pockets, or enjoy a little more risk than you, but they're just the same.  How do you think all the people who aren't traders feel when people like you take out leveraged positions and fuck the market sideways for your own personal gain?  

This is such a ridiculously small part of the market now that the original Silk Road is done and gone, the successors have fucked their customers, and the market has fragmented into multiple sketchy sites.


Uh-huh.  Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Worth the paper it's printed on?  Guy, I throw dollar sized pieces of paper into the recycling bin all day.  By that measure it's worthless too.  That aside, the massive amount of computational power is what makes Bitcoin and the blockchain work.  It is what backs bitcoin.  Further, your thoughts about selling "real computation power" shows you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about.  

For several reasons. One being that a lot of the Chinese markets were actually played by westerners, who migrated there through BTC.
Second reason would be that not all of that money on the exchanges is exactly clean and would create trouble if one would try to withdraw it through a Chinese bank. If I would be investigating financial crimes, then I sure would be extra thorough when investigating the transactions that take place between bitcoin exchanges.
Third to consider here, is that some of the Chinese buyers actually valued BTC for moving funds outside China.

I didn't also think that this percentage of fiat at the Chinese exhanges would be this big, that it would spike the price over 500. So, I was suprised when it did.
Right now the ones who have migrated are still holding coins, because there still is a possibility that the price could rise even more with following Huobi. And Huobi is rising because people need to buy coins to migrate with.
They will start dumping if the price goes flat and the volume to non-existant again. Because, remember, there hasn't been any news that would attract new fiat to enter the market. And without new fiat entering, the price won't be able to sustain itself for long.

BTC would never be world currency, it would be stopped long before that due to its design flaws. It's too tiny now and not worth squashing, but be sure, the 3-5 top mining pools will be taken over when bitcoin becomes something more or less significant. That's why Proof-of-Stake is the future if any of these decentralized currencies are to have any real footing in the financial matters a few years down the road. Bitcoin is just too easy of a target to kill, no gubermint will stand that competition if it can be nipped in the bud with very little efforts.

Most of your ramblings are striaght out of the twilight zone, but I support this theory.

The Chinese equivalent of Joe Blow hasn't been trading Bitcoin since Dec 2013. What are left are well connected professional bandits with access to international finance that 99.9% of the Chinese population don't have. The whole appeal of Bitcoin to China in the first place was getting wealth out of CNY and into USD.




My predictions are generally pretty good. Problem is my impulse controlled decision making that conspires to slash profits and on this occasion, make the mother of all bad trades. The past couple of days have been my worst Bitcoin trade ever. Ironically, it was through a 'discipline' to hold out through the past knowledge that I needn't have taken a hit on one single trade I have ever taken a loss on, 'if only I had waited it out'. Therefore, I held onto my position well into red territory several order of magntitude beyond the point which would have had me leaping on the Close button previously...cos everytime I have taken a loss on a trade I have regretted it two days later.....probably do the same with this one but the difference this time is this has been enough of a hit to make sure it was the last. Bet you that there are a growing number of people who feel like me in regards to Bitcoin and at least in my case, I can safely say that I have still had more profit out of Bitcoin than I have endured loss. I bet there are many more Nov 2013 Bitcoin entrants who cannot say that and there will be many more to come.

And aside from this, anyone noticed how much more annoying it is getting funds in and out of Bitstamp in increasingly small amounts. At first it was 5 figure sums that resulted in Bitstamp wanting payslips, tax returns etc before they would credit my account. Now it is down to just 4. ~$3000 to be precise. I refuse to provide these fuckers with this information so the money is getting sent back to my bank account, I will empty the rest of my BTC exchange accounts in the coming days and then that will be it. Now, a handful of stroppy pip squeek investors stomping off in a hiff cos they lost some money is hardly going to bring Bitcoin to it's knees. But as for future widepsread adoption, who the fuck is going to submit to the exchanges KYC' procedures just to get a few K into Bitcoin? As for the more substantial amounts of money flowing into Bitcoin, i.e. large chunks of capital looking for a piece of off-radar action, I think that writing is on the wall that this is going to become increasingly harder and more expensive to do, perhaps making more conventional routes of tax evasion and money laundering more appealing. Take those big two liquidity injectors away from Bitcoin and what does it have?

• Speculators (currently getting royally fucked with by Chinese Bitcoin Bandits)
• Silk Road
• Novelty purchases done just for the sake of using Bitcoin to buy something with. (durrr....go to trouble and expense of buying Bitcoins, to buy product with Bitcoin which is converted immediately into the fiat that I could have just fkn paid in the first place without any transfer delays, exchange fees, and exchange anal probing.

The one thing I have left off that list is 'Capital Flight' from non USD hegemony compliant economies. Mark my fucking words, it will be from these situations that Bitcoin will experience real future inflations in value (after the Chinese are done playing their games), which was exactly the reason why the NSA floated Bitcoin out into the public arena through a libertarian back door in the first place. Bitcoin is not 'against The Man', it is by The Man and for The Man. If folks are thinking that the USD dominated fiat currency system is vaporous, they aint seen nothing yet!

I will take a much longer break from Bitcoin than 6 months. I have been against Bitcoin philosophically for some time but was addicted to trading it cos I was winning. Now that I am losing, I have no further interest in it. I will be back here to indulge in some empty gloating when Bitcoin hits $200 range like I said it would....and it will.

No.  Cost per coin is hovering around $100.  The feedback loop is broken and there are a lot of pre-orders yet to be delivered.  Even if everyone stopped ordering new hardware today, hardware would continue shipping and the difficulty would continue rising.  Further, mining only produces a finite amount of coins per day, of which only a percentage make it to an exchange.  Those that make it to an exchange make up a ridiculously small percentage of the daily trade volume. 

Exactly! Nice to see some healthy common sense in this forum

The idea would make any sense if it would actually increase the network security like it should. But it doesn't. All you have to do is compromise the security systems of couple of pools and you could control 51% of the network and compromise the entire network. It doesn't mater how many TH/s is a single pool controlling, a single pool is still a single pool.
Proof-of-Stake mining is more advanced in that perspective, and you can mine with just owning coins. This also means that if someone wants to mine coins, then he has to buy coins, and that will actually raise the market cap. PoW mining demands that people pay for machines that in all probability are useless junk in a year. So, BTC actually stimulates meaningless production.
Scypt miners at least used GPU for some time, that had also other uses besides mining. But now this will be also ruined by ASICs that have no other use then to mine coins.

That is one of the reason why I find it weird, that some people say that BTC is the currency of the future and it will last decades etc.
It has fundamental flaws that would need extreme ignorance to just be ignored. When BTC would be the world currency and 30% of world energy is just wasted without getting any gain whatsoever, then the future will be exactly like it was showing in the movie "Idiocracy"

Well $1 would be worth more than the internet right ? You can wipe your ass with $1 but not with the Internet since it doesn't exist ?

Or a domain like www.sex.com . Why pay $1 for it when it doesn't even exist and you can use it as toilet paper ?

And so, if the miners want to make money, they have to hold until they do.  Otherwise they lose.  This, in turn, raises the bitcoin price, getting more people involved.  This is by design.  It may seem stupid to you, but it seems brilliant to me.

So you think the Chinese are going to mass dump on the USD exchanges? Why would they do that if they can sell on the Chinese exchanges and withdraw locally?

The whole way crypto mining is done is idiotic in my opinion. We have this massive amount of computation power doing basically nothing and fighting over a rapidly diminishing resource. The resource "BTC" happens to be totally worthless. At least a dollar bill is worth the paper it is printed on but BTC isn't even that. So we keep building ASICs which are more sophisticated; more powerful but no more productive because of the increased difficulty. It would make more sense if we had a network that sold real computation power. We could still get paid in crypto currency. Basically use the pools to sell computation power in return for payment in terms of BTC or other crypto currency. Might need to go beyond highly specialized ASICs but at least we'd be doing something useful and not require this arms race as you correctly noted.

My conspiracy theory is not that someone is trying to pump the market or depress the market but that someone is trying to daytrade the market using alternating pieces of chinese news.

Thank god for that. The arms race for bitcoin mining was the most idiotic examples of sensless wasting because of stupidity and greed.

This time it actually wasn't all fake, but caused by people who are migrating their fiat to western exhanges through BTC. Right now most of the fiat has piled up to BTC, but it's pretty fragile and will start to fall as soon as the volatility slows down.
You can see it by Huobi leading the rises, but BTC-E leading the drops. People are buying coins in China and selling them in the western exhanges.

Bitcoin mining is risking becoming unprofitable using any of the upcoming technologies by this summer. That means a drop in ASIC sales; a drop in mining and a drop in liquidity. One way to keep it going is to pump the Bitcoin price. Therefore it makes sense for big players to do what they can to pump up the price. It doesn't take much to do this as a relatively small increase in demand will push up the prices. As prices go up people will hold on to their BTC hoping it will go up even higher and that will spiral the prices for a while. In return projected profitability of new ASIC devices improves as will their sales for now.

There is still the fundamental issue that most of the new money has been dried up, so now we are dealing mostly with traders jerking each other off, rather than swarms of new investors entering the market.